


we'll walk in fields of gold

by strikinglight



Series: Stopping for a Spell [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gardens & Gardening, M/M, Mages, magic inn au, magical inn run by the katsuki family, otabek loves plants and is pure, rarepairsonice, yuri meanwhile talks to animals and does not get plants at all until
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 10:31:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9380405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: All the books say the winter jasmine is a wonder—no other plant persists in flowering over the worst of the cold months; or somehow survives, with an almost human stubbornness, in whatever site or soil offered it, dry ground or damp, in sun, in shade or anything in between.Yuri tells Otabek as much, one morning, on the way back into the inn from the stables: “It doesn’t need you, you know. If you leave it, it will blossom just the same.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayerwien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayerwien/gifts).



> For May, who lets me play in her worlds, and who's always, always welcome in mine. Lemme suckerpunch you right back. 
> 
> Also in celebration of YOI Rarepair Week--this will come in at around day 5, I think.
> 
> Title from one of my favorite songs, Sting's "Fields of Gold."

When he’s not drying herbs or grinding them up for poultices, or riding afield to speak with the farmers about how the vegetables are faring, Otabek tends the winter jasmine that climbs over the walls in the inn yard.

At times he prunes the bushes, clearing the dead wood with a pair of shears, taming wild outgrowths where he finds them. At times he plays songs to them, on the little reed panpipes he carries always stuck in his belt, and the soft rippling notes wind their way upward even after Yuri’s closed all the windows to the upper rooms.

And at other times Otabek simply sits on the bench propped up against the wall, leaning back a little on the heels of his palms and letting the dangling branches brush his shoulders, the crown of his head, and seems to do nothing at all.

Yuri can’t for the life of him understand why Otabek does these things, when a plant mage would know the winter jasmine doesn't need half so much care. Yuri is no plant mage, but he knows as much. The winter jasmine had been his idea, in fact—he himself had recommended that Hiroko send Yuuri to the woods for cuttings just this past spring, when he’d heard her muse aloud about flowers that could bloom mostly untouched, that might even survive the whole year round.

(Spring was for herblore, which meant days spent buried in the oldest, most worn-down books in Yakov’s personal library—pages upon pages of ink sketches, flowers and bulbs and leaves that in the beginning had all run together in Yuri’s mind. It also meant too many long walks, too many hours spent on his hands and knees in the middle of some forest copse, staring fixedly at three different kinds of seed and struggling to tell them apart. Yuri had hated it, but he’d learned.)

All the books say the winter jasmine is a wonder—no other plant persists in flowering over the worst of the cold months; or somehow survives, with an almost human stubbornness, in whatever site or soil offered it, dry ground or damp, in sun, in shade or anything in between.

Yuri tells Otabek as much, one morning, on the way back into the inn from the stables: “It doesn’t need you, you know. If you leave it, it will blossom just the same.”

Otabek had been playing his pipes a little prior, and Yuri had lingered behind the stable door, pretending to be fully preoccupied with casting about for the mice nesting in the hay bales until the song was done. Otabek sits now on the bench with them still in his hands, and there is something about the slow way he raises his head at the sound of Yuri’s voice, something in those dark eyes and the solemn set of his mouth, that make Yuri wonder with no small measure of bitterness if the man can see through walls, too.

“I know,” he says—too gentle by half, when Yuri’s every word is a needle. “I like being near it, that’s all.”

 

* * *

 

“What spell did he put on you, that you carried him all the way over the mountains?”

Otabek’s horse Irina is tall, like him, and lean, and dark like the deep night—but far more beautiful, Yuri thinks sourly as he works at the knots in her mane with a big metal comb, and not nearly so inscrutable as her riddle of a rider. He can understand horses, he knows what words to use with horses, so it’s to her that Yuri directs the questions he can’t ever bring himself to ask another human being. But he’s careful, still, to ask them slant; he needs to, if he’s going to save his pride.

 _No spell. It was easy to do, for him. My master has kind eyes and a light hand, and he keeps the rein long._ Irina tosses her head, and the voice Yuri hears in his mind shifts—arches upward, almost teasing. _He’s never talked to me the way I hear you talk to him, sometimes._

My _master is so wild and wilful he must need a short rein,_ Katya cuts in before he can reply, weaving between his legs and flicking her tail at his ankles. She darts to one side before he can nudge at her body with his toe. _Or is there enough magic in those light hands to bring him to heel, do you think?_

“Stupid cat,” Yuri growls under his breath. He can already feel the heat spreading upward from the back of his neck, making his cheeks tingle.

When seconds later he lifts his head and finds Otabek’s eyes watching him from outside the stall, across the dip of his horse’s back, Yuri hears all the blood in his body surge upward, the tide of it crashing and roaring in his ears. It’s impossible, Yuri thinks, that anyone’s steps should be that quiet without some kind of spell. Impossible.

“Thank you for being so good to my Irina.” Otabek’s eyes break from Yuri’s as he turns to reach for the saddle slung over the stall door, lifting it up over one shoulder. There’s that silence again, in his words and his face and the retiring set of his shoulders, and Yuri feels himself go all snarled-up, twisted and sharp inside his skin. Like he doesn’t quite fit into it as well as he should. Like nothing is right. “She likes your care and your company very well.”

“You can’t know that. She doesn’t talk to you.”

Yuri knows, full well, the way he talks to people. It’s not as easy, for some reason, as speaking with the animals—other people’s words chafe at him too much, and his own outrun him too often, coming out acidic and cutting, too quick to burn. But those words break against Otabek’s silence and fall harmlessly to the ground.

“There are many ways to talk, Yuri,” he answers, and carries Irina's saddle out to the yard for cleaning.

Yuri doesn’t shout after him that there are spells for that. He understands this, if nothing else—some things still feel better done by hand.

 

* * *

 

The mystery, when you get to the heart of the matter, is that Otabek never does any magic that Yuri can see.

Not to say, of course, that only the magic one can know with their eyes can possibly be real. That might be the case for the townspeople, who for all the magic in their midst have never quite grown out of their wonder, and therefore can’t but stand and gaze in awe at colored lights, at spells of changing—a pebble into a gold coin, a gold coin into a butterfly. All child’s play, Yuri knows now, these small enchantments. True power runs deeper; true knowledge reaches past all that glitters on the surface and down, down toward the hearts of things.

Yuri wants to believe he knows this better than most, the same way he knows his own mind and his own gifts, and those of others too. Those who deal in spellcraft almost always recognize each other, see some measure of the other’s power. It’s a wordless kind of knowing, the kind of understanding felt in the bones.

(Any mage could learn to understand beast-speech, Yakov had said—a concession, the one time Yuri had ever pressed his teacher for a word, some appraisal of the depth and reach of his gifts. But it took years, in most instances, to achieve thorough understanding; more still, to learn to respond. Before Yuri he’d never heard of another mage with an inner ear so keen.

And at this Yakov had frowned, deeply, face hardening until it appeared chiseled from stone, and said he would say no more about that, gods forbid that someone so young as Yuri should start thinking his talents so rare and precious they needed no schooling.)

But Otabek, Otabek’s magic is different from any kind Yuri knows, the deep-rooted patience of it like the earth itself. Like the earth in which those precious flowers of his lie sleeping, so deep into winter.

 

* * *

 

It’s only after he hears Hiroko and Yuuri remark upon it that Yuri realizes the flowers have changed.

They’d been standing by the window in the common room early in the morning, the big eastward-facing one that looked out into the yard, and Yuuri had gasped and nudged at his mother with his elbow, whispered _It looks like spring_. She’d smiled and nodded her head in that knowing way of hers, and had said only, _Why, yes, it does._

(Otabek had ridden out for the fields on the outskirts at first light this morning; Yuri, restless for some reason and unable to sleep, had folded his arms down onto the windowsill by his bed and watched him go. And then he’d gotten up and gone down to the kitchen, all the inn still asleep around him but for Hiroko and Yuuri setting the breakfast table.

“I’ll see to the mice in the pantry,” he’d said, without preamble. They’d smiled at him and murmured their thanks and made no comment about how he was up so unusually early. It was after that, once he’d come back out after somehow managing to shoo the mice out to the storage shed on the far end of the grounds, that he found them ogling the flowers. But he did not, of course, go over to the window to see what all the fuss was about.)

It’s only after the noon meal, after Yakov pulls him from the afternoon’s reading with a directive to go out and practice calling the winter birds each by name, that Yuri _sees—_ steps out the back door into the yard and sees the wild abundance of yellow blossoms that cover the walls, spilling down over the bricks and down toward the snow-covered ground. Even Katya, curled languidly around his shoulders, perks up her head at the sight.

“You’re not to disturb those bushes.” He can’t keep the wonder out of his voice, try as he might to summon back the harshness he’s used to. “You’re not to climb and pull them down.”

I _would never._ The cat tweaks at his ear with the tip of her tail, her laugh tinkling like many small silver bells. _You know we cats have an eye for the beautiful. I wonder, though, if you do._

Yuri doesn’t answer. He’s already thinking back to the winter birds—which ones he could call to perch in those branches, which ones might even agree to sing from them.

 

* * *

 

The next time Yuri sees Otabek from his window, tending the winter jasmine, he goes out into the yard and sits on the bench by the wall, saying nothing.

Otabek doesn’t ask questions, registers no surprise to see him there; he says only “Good morning, Yuri”—as he does every day, the first moment they cross paths, without fail—and returns to his work. In silence Yuri watches him prune the branches, cutting away a broken stem here, a faded bloom there, every movement so precise and careful it looks almost like love.

He doesn’t realize he’s pulled his cloak closer around himself, brought his fingertips up to his face to warm them, until Otabek speaks up.

“It’s a fair day today, but it’s still winter,” he says, gently. “You could go back inside.”

“I’m fine,” Yuri snaps—the words outrun him again, and yet for once they have no edge. It’s strange, to say the least, what this day is doing to him; how he feels himself softening, almost thawing out, snow-melt and mild morning sun. “I’m not some fragile flower.”

He can’t place the sound he hears, doesn’t know it for what it is right away—a small rumbling noise, deep and quiet and so strangely warm. He needs to listen for a few beats, _really_ listen, before he realizes Otabek is laughing. Before he thinks to himself this must be the first time, ever, he’s heard Otabek laugh.

“Yuri, do these flowers look fragile to you?”

Yuri remembers reading about it in Yakov’s books, the flower that comes back again and again, no matter how the frost might try to devastate it. But it’s only now that he realizes he’d never before _seen_ the winter jasmine, not truly, until Otabek came and brought it to life on these walls—and now he knows it at last the way he knows Otabek’s magic, the strong, supple young wood and the evergreen leaves and the profusion of yellow flowers like a shower of stars.

There’s a pair of shears in Otabek’s hand and a set of panpipes in his belt, and for all the snow on the ground Yuri can’t help thinking— _It does. It does look like spring_. _It will sound like it, too, when the birds come._

“You could sit beside me.” Even as he speaks he’s already moving a few inches across the bench, opening up the space. “You could play them your song.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The original AU in which this fic is set--the Katsuki Family's Magical Inn and the Dime-a-Dozen Fantasy Village of Hasetsu(TM), which basically attracts mages and wizards from all over who come and live there and help out around the place and get up to all sorts of silly things--is May's brainchild. I basically got way too excited about plants!Otabek and animals!Yuri and the too-precious-for-words idea of Otabek loving gardening, and so I speedwrote this to get rid of the adrenaline, haha. The work this actually spins off of is still in progress, which makes this a weird kind of preemptive spinoff, but in the spirit of full disclosure, suffice to say I really hope its progenitor gets unstuck eventually so we can all die more over the plants.
> 
> 2\. I was a little liberal with my botany because fantasy AU, but the winter jasmine is indeed a hardy shrub that flowers throughout the winter months and is often used to embellish some sort of structure like a wall or a trellis, as you can see [here](http://www.flowerspictures.org/image/types/jasminum-nudiflorum/winter-jasmine.jpg) and [here](https://cohutt.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/dsc_1754.jpg?w=768&h=509).


End file.
